Decided to draft a follow up of this post that I wrote in length about how "father" is for me and what happened to him that shaped part of my development.
By the way, my friend did write a nice article about a role of father in a family, which you could read it if you can understand Chinese.
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| Now you know where that flowers loving genes came from, well, to be more precise, the mother |
Gonna be honest, the largest motivator of writing this post was due to one of the points in that article, where it mentioned that for those who grown up from dysfunctional family where father lost his function, we tend to fixate our view on our father from certain (negative) perspective. My last post about him was pretty much from that perspective, and after 14 years, went through several forms of therapies, counselings, prayers and reading, I think I developed new perspective of looking at him.
I guess you would agree with me that there is no practice/class/trial to be a father, not to mention during 80s where information was not yet widely distributed through easily accessed means like Internet. My father is not exception. He failed in financial planning despite the fact that he was working as an insurance agent back then (where assumably financial advising was part of his job). He invested in stock without study and over-spent on home renovation (by signing up overdraft!). As the consequences of ignorance and poor discipline in financial management, he started the loan shark journey and you know the rest of the story from previous post about him. His siblings were blaming him on his failure in managing home finances (because they bailed him out from loan sharks, and they lost a shared property along the way of that bail out), but I think they missed out the fact that he was actually preparing a comfortable home for his own family. Nope, I am not agreeing on how he spent and the shit he had done on us (e.g. stealing my and sister's piggy banks saving during our sleeps), but it is fair to say that he was not an evil person after all. Should someone disciplined or advised him before he made those bad financial decisions, he would have saved all those agony and trouble he brought to our family and building something from his lucrative job. Well, we either emulate or compensate our parents in a family, such is the dynamics of a family unit. As such, my ability to stay zero liability at this age and building wealth is partially thankful for his existence, hehehe....
We are thankful that he is willing to fix all home utilities, too. Pipes, wires, racks, you name it! We share some handiworks sometimes, like wood work or furnitures repairing. Nevertheless, I hate the fact that he loves to hoard and I can testify the fact that hoarding is actually a form of inferiority, whereby an individual thinks that they are going to spend extra money on or unable to purchase spares parts (such as fan blades from broken fan) if s/he choose to discard the item. It is called loss aversion in behavioural economics and you can read more about it, here. Well, again, I know his intention, to save money, but hoarding unnecessary items is increasing fire risk and lowering quality of living at home, too....
In some ways, we share quite some similarities. One of it, is that we are religious (in our separated ways). When I was young, I was often brought to several different Chinese temples to undergo some rituals. I guess for most children who come from such family who subscribed to animistic believes (mind you, they are not Taoism or Buddhism if you study such religion carefully), did not have the choice to not participate in such ritual when they were under their parents control. From certain perspective, such religion is a mix of Confucianism, Shamanism, Buddhism and anything else, so children are expected to just follow what their parents believe in, to continue their tradition (Confucianism), otherwise it is a curse to their family (Shamanism) or an disobedient act (Confucianism again...). Well, perhaps their parents did not have bad intention when it comes to bringing their children to participate in such rituals because who hates blessings? The problem is, some rituals were quite horrible, like this one that scared the shit out of me when my dad asked be to bow in front of idols and had the medium to wave his whip with force around me...
Of course, this is just a sample photo I grabbed online, but I guess you get the picture, especially if you are also coming from such family. I could imagine how deep the wound would be if the medium whack that (assuming dirty and patogen contaminated) thing on me accidentally, who is going to responsible to that wound? Of course, I was not hit but I still don't know why those temple folks, including my dad who were the temple EXCO, forcefully put me in that situation. During those days, I was forced to participate on various rituals that were conducted at home, too though I never even believe in such bullshit (pardon me, it was really the best word for me. It is not about political correctness here, please!). I was encouraged to pick up books and read at the very young age and perhaps it is unlucky for him that my favourite since then is science, philosophy and history. This is where we are different up until today, too. I am (as much as I can) rational, analytical while my dad is pretty much an obedient and sentimental man. OK fine, sometimes we switch sides (e.g. when he has to fix all those appliances and while I am acting as listener for others) but most of the time, we are who we are, different camps. In order to stop him from pulling me into any other non-sensical rituals again, I spent most of my time in gaming, books and part time jobs. Man, I still remember how pissed off he was when my first tuition tutor was sharing me Bible stories after class, brought me to church youth camps, telling him that I was baptised.... but those were the only ways for him to stop his behaviours back then! Thanks God, we are able to live harmoniously under one roof and I accumulated enough wisdom to cope with various religious discrepancies occur during family gathering (most of them are non-Christian). I guess with him worshipping 6 idols at home, participating in temples ceremonies and various traditional Chinese animistic rituals while I am involved in various services in church diligently, we are not that different eh?
It is not easy to change perspectives on someone who hurts you in the past, especially the person who you cannot cut tie with, like father. In fact, it would shape how you if you are focusing too much on those hurts, dissent, grudge or negativity because "...those who are defiled and unbelieving, nothing is pure..." (Titus 1:15). We may develop some strong coping mechanism from such challenges but I'd encourage you to focus on positive characteristics instead, for long term goals because again, "if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you" (Nietzsche).
Perhaps this is also why I am easily tears when there is touching scenes between father and son, physically or mentally, fiction or non-fiction... I don't have a good father figures so I seek for it in books, religions, games, songs, interaction between father and son (among my friends or acquittances). Yes, I have grown up and not intend to become a father myself (well, first, I need to have a wife), but it helps when there is such figure/person exists to help me out sometimes.
As for my dad, I wish him well as he is entering his 60s and let's not forget that, he is also the husband, sibling, committee member, business owner, citizen, team member etc for others. I always tell myself that, it is important to look at a person from various perspectives (roles the person carries), so that I am lock on certain emotion or behaviour toward that person. When you develop new feeling towards that person, congratulation, you grow!
photos by Backdoor Bodega
"Listen to your father, who fathered you, And do not despise your mother when she is old." ~ Proverbs 23:22
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